"Bhutto" Movie Review: Telling Pakistan's Story Through Its One-Time Leader

Comments (0) By Nick Schager Thursday, Feb 17 2011

Despite the biodoc implication of its title, Bhutto is not just a portrait of the late Benazir Bhutto but also a chronological recap of Pakistan's anarchic history.

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Cinema Paradiso

503 SE Sixth St.
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301

Category: Movie Theaters

Region: Fort Lauderdale

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Bhutto
directed by Duane Baughman. 111 minutes. Not rated. Opens February 18 at Cinema Paradiso, 503 SE Sixth St., Fort Lauderdale. Call 954-525-3456, or click here.

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Duane Baughman's nonfiction film pays reverential tribute to Bhutto, who, after the 1979 execution of her prime minister father, became the first woman elected to rule a Muslim state and assumed her paterfamilias' mantle as the country's leading proponent of democratic government, an agenda stymied by a military apparatus increasingly bent on hard-line Islamic law. Baughman sketchily addresses the charges of corruption and strategic miscalculations leveled against Bhutto.

Still, the director's lionization of the prime minister — assassinated in 2007 after eight years in exile — is bolstered by Bhutto's stirring archival-footage calls for a more just society and by an extensive itemization of Pakistan's ceaseless tumult. Contextualizing the prime minister's rise to power within a larger portrait of a nation under constant internal and external siege, Bhutto conveys a forceful sense of tectonic social and geopolitical shifts and the courageous, heartbreaking personal sacrifices its subject made in service to her homeland and ideals.